In recent years, numerous manufacturers of toilet paper products have recognized the need to develop new manufacturing methods and designs to help save the environment from unnecessary pollution. One method used has been to eliminate the mountains of unnecessary paper waste generated through their historical practice of winding the toilet paper over disposal cardboard tubes. The disposal of these cardboard tubes on the worldwide scale is enormous, with literally millions of tubes being discarded every hour of the day into landfills and the like on the worldwide stage. For this reason, there developed a need for tubeless toilet paper rolls, and tubeless rolls of other web material. Use of these tubeless rolls, however, has been met with resistance because of certain differences in the appearance, function and feel of such rolls.
Tubeless rolls face challenges such as:
1) Overcoming the perception by the public that paper or material rolls need to have central tubes.
2) Overcoming people's preference for rolls with central tubes, recognizing that change is always uncomfortable and is almost always met with resistance, the insert is designed to help overcome this negative bias.
3) As shown in FIGS.7 and 8, tubeless toilet paper rolls may they have central holes that are irregular in shape, which makes it hard to insert the spring loaded central roller axle shafts (hereinafter, “roller axle’) that are necessary for proper attachment to external housing 600 as shown in FIG. 5.
4) Another functional issue with the “tubeless” toilet paper rolls without central cardboard tubes for stability, is that as the roll approaches the final 10% of the paper volume, the roll will start to wobble and “collapse” before the roll is fully used and may eventually fall off the roller axle thus causing additional and unnecessary waste paper for disposal.